6 Ways Teachers Kill the Joy of Learning

Teachers work hard. They are honorable people, who are part of a unique fraternity. Teachers change young lives. The best ones inspire students to become self-evaluative, independent lifelong learners. Unfortunately, far too many teachers cling to ineffective strategies, and they unwittingly kill the joy of learning.

Why is this? Killing the joy of learning is certainly not a conscious effort. The short and simple answer to the why question is because most educators learn to teach in outdated traditional and uninspiring ways. So, to inspire a joy of learning in students, avoid the following.

6 Ways to Kill the Joy of Learning

1-Talk too much

Preservice teachers learn to talk. Traditional classes begin with lecture (educators call this direct instruction). Nothing kills the joy of learning more than telling students what they should know. Kids are naturally curious. They want to discover learning. Keeping direct instruction to five or fewer minutes and encouraging inquiry learning puts students at the center of the class. So, talk less and move to the side. The joy of learning begins here.

Two simple, go-to strategies that teachers learn during preservice are the worksheet and homework. Teachers lecture about a skill or concept, then hand out prefabricated worksheets that attempt to mimic what was taught during direct instruction. Often, the worksheet becomes part of nightly homework. The typical worksheet includes fill-in-the-blank, matching, and multiple choice sections. Students who play the school game well are typically good at worksheets. For students whose minds wander or students with outside issues that interfere with learning (ADHD for example), worksheets kill the joy of learning. Sadly, most of these students suffer from poor grades, too (see number 6). Kids hate homework and most detest worksheets. Piling these on serves no purpose, apart from killing the joy of learning.

3-Use rules and consequences

I used to be a “My-way-or-the-highway” teacher. Kids hated me. Do’s and Don’ts were posted everywhere, and when students broke my ridiculous rules (talked, moved from seats, chewed gum, etc.), consequences came swiftly. When I learned to give up control and discard all of the ridiculous rules and consequences, everything changed in my classroom. Unlike some of my younger colleagues, I wasn’t funny or overly creative; students didn’t suddenly love me, but they didn’t hate me either. And they grew to love my student-centered classroom. Best of all, when I embraced collaboration and a little chaos, students discovered the joy of learning.

4-Give students one way to learn

The problem with worksheets, workbooks, and multiple choice tests is that they put all children in the same box, assuming they can climb the same ladder to escape. The easiest way to kill the joy of learning is to inspire curiosity in a subject, only to eviscerate that curiosity with a rote memory activity. There are many ways to engage students, and the digital world creates multiple paths to learning (more on this in number 5.)

5-Ignore mobile learning and social media

There is little denial that we are teaching iStudents, who want to use mobile devices and social media. It’s time to stop telling our kids to put their devices in their lockers or, worse, to leave them at home. Amazing mobile technology puts billions of teachers in the palms of students’ hands, so we must learn to become iTeachers, or continue to risk killing the joy of learning. For more on mobile learning strategies, visit our mobile learning archive.

6-Use traditional grades

Arguably the easiest way to kill the joy of learning is to punish students with numbers, percentages, and letter grades. Like the worksheet and homework, traditional grades are a crutch that educators have been using for centuries. It’s the way we’ve always done it, but we now have the power and the insight to stop. When learning becomes a conversation, and students are redirected to prior learning and given a chance to resubmit activities to continue the conversation, the result is mastery learning. Rather than place subjective numbers or letters on our students’ work, teachers need to use a feedback model, like SE2R, to create amazing conversations about learning (see video below). This approach alone can revolutionize your classroom and instill a joy of learning in your students.

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

I read articles like this and I wonder what classroom these people are working in. I am a few days away from my first year as a teacher and it has been hell. I taught high school math – five different subjects a day. I was the only math teacher; my mentor was the science teacher, a lot easier to do hands on stuff… and a VERY different philosophy of education.

I have policies set by the school board about how many grades I have to have, policies by the state about the topics I have to cover.

No direct instruction? Everything I teach is extremely hypothetical and abstract. Sometimes I can find real world uses but often the real world requires things much simpler than I’m teaching… or much more complex. That’s why word problems in books tend to be so contrived. In fact, I started out trying to do a flipped classroom model… but my students refused to read at home, some didn’t have net access so Khan Academy was out (and the school actually blocked YouTube). The only way to actually get information to my students was to tell it to them in class.

Worksheets and homework? The school mandated a certain grade split. Mathematically, if I gave my students perfect scores on all formative assessments, they’d only need a 25% on the summative ones to pass the course. 25% doesn’t show knowledge mastery. Heck, I started out the year flabbergasted at how little my students knew from previous classes.

No rules and consequences? I have kids literally throwing things at each other, attacking each other, and vandalizing school property. There’s a difference between a chaotic classroom that allows learning and a chaotic classroom that distracts from learning.

More than one way to learn… I keep looking for this, and see strategies, and it seems all of them are written for other classes or lower grade levels. I have no idea how to apply any of them to the very abstract concepts found in high school math.

Keep kids connected? This was my biggest bane! I gave kids classroom time to work on assignments, while I’m there to help. Some kids used that time and help. Others? Well, the school gave all the students laptops, so they had Flash games, Netflix, or Tinder that were far more interesting than math.

And then there’s the SE2R method. My first thought? “I’m already killing myself trying to get on top of all this grading, and now I’m supposed to grade assignments repeatedly?” I have students who give up as soon as they get a 70, students who have been conditioned to expect passing grades from doing halfass jobs (especially when I express concern to the administrators and they ask me if I could drop a few zeroes to bring grades up so we don’t lose funding), and students who could get hundreds but it would be too much work.

These seem like excellent tips for dealing with students who come already motivated to learn, in districts where the teachers have more flexibility in number of assignments and grade weights. But many of them seem terrible to use with students who have already lost a love of learning… which is many high school students.

Derek, I sense lots of frustration on your part, and it’s understandable. Schools that mandate how teachers teach and demand weekly grades and homework have leaders that destroy teaching and learning. If you can’t influence change there, I’d recommend creating an exit strategy because you’re in a place that does not have kids’ best interests at heart. Or, if it does, the leades are misguided in their approach. As far as throwing out grades and rules and consequences, this is a systemic change that takes a full year of patience and perseverance. Several years, I had classes filled with students like those you describe. I stuck with the program, though. I talked to them daily about being part of a vibrant learning community. I pulled kids aside every single day, explaining how I needed them to contribute. Most important, I worked tirelessly to create lessons with short segments and lots of transition. I’ve had the most challenging students you can have, and trust me, if you keep things moving (never do one thing for more than 5 minutes), and make it fun, kids will engage. Meanwhile, let me recommend a book: 5 Principles of the Modern Mathematics Classroom, by Gerald Aungst (disclaimer: I wrote the foreword). This is a marvelous starting ground for finding innovative ways to teach math. http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Modern-Mathematics-Classroom-Innovative/dp/1483391426/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464096930&sr=1-1&keywords=gerald+aungst. Good luck and stay in touch.Mark Barnes recently posted…6 Bad Reasons Teachers Assign Homework and Why Each One Sucks

One thing I forgot to add. Formative assessment should never be graded. Not that I favor grades at any point of learning, but formative assessment is about diagnosing problems. During the formative assessment process, mistakes should be embraced and used to inform future lessons. Hope this helps.Mark Barnes recently posted…6 Bad Reasons Teachers Assign Homework and Why Each One Sucks

I do agree with you that there are many learning joy killer practices inside our classrooms some of which are what you mentioned in this article. Still, setting rules to control some unwanted behaviours inside the classroom is really crucial at least for me, Because without these rules, one can live in a chaotic atmosphere which definitely hinders the teacher from achieving his/her objectives. A student who moves from his seat without permission or use his mobile phone to check his facebook profile or listen to music can never assimilate your message.

An engaged classroom is all well and good…. Learning from a little chaos? At an early age?…. Appropriate boundaries need to be provided. Chaos is often what many students are trying to get away from in their home lives- whether as children or adult learners and anywhere in between. This is not the 1960’s. The world is a much different place. When the students you have taught arrive to my community college classroom without the basics of understanding what it is to research, to think critically, how to communicate effectively, listen effectively and graciously in the group learning environment; how to write a sentence, and how not to use their phones to for personal texts during class, their earlier education years have not been ineffective.

An engaged, chaotic classroom takes work to create. When done right, there’s nothing better for any age. I wonder if you’ve ever seen a Kindergarten class. Most are chaotic, creative, engaging places. When we introduce control, learning stops.Mark Barnes recently posted…5 Websites That Make Language Learning More Interactive